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Comment by anyfoo | Hacker News Reader

Obviously not, since we’re discussing it on a site with content moderation right now that, in my opinion, works much better than sites without.

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It's only under control, I think, because it's very specific in terms of content. The weakness many social networks have is that it's basically an open platform for any discussion, and that makes it harder to put boundaries around. It makes sense to heavily restrict subject matters on sites with specialized content but general social networks are still facing the issues mentioned in the article, IMHO.

I agree that being specific about content makes things easier, but HN is not so specific. Anything intellectually interesting is on topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and that makes for a lot of long, difficult explanations - e.g.:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Sure, maybe it's not that constrained, but consider something like memes, which is expected of many sites, but definitely not here.

Greater institutions have fallen; thats when we got the term Eternal September. It just takes the right influx of users to overcome the human moderators.

I think when the content becomes too broad then tribalism becomes more apparent as people start to form separate groups within the community. This creates a lot of drama as the tribes are forced to be under one roof.

When the content is more specific, like PC master race, or people that drive VW bugs, then the community identifies itself as a single tribe, and they tend to treat each other well.

Another site with moderated comments is Ars Technica. It works out great for them.

On the other side there is unmoderated Phoronix, which has the worst comment section that I've ever seen.

Is it worse than YouTube comments? I have never looked at it but that has to be something..

YouTube comments are actually pretty good these days, I find.

Most comments on YouTube are vacuous, it's not worth wading through them.

You are right, not worth scrolling down beyond the top handful.

vacuous does not equate to toxic. I would gladly take an internet where the biggest problems on the internet were tired jokes and excessive emoji spam.

As far as forums go HN is very low volume.

HN is hardly as diverse a site to moderate as YouTube and Reddit

Should all forums rules conform to HN?

Downvoted for sophistry and complete lack of addition to the discourse. Or do you happen to do a better job moderating a site elsewhere?

I personally don’t think your comment puts the effectiveness of moderation is in question, just the efficiency. So yes, I think places like YouTube and Reddit would greatly benefit from similar moderation (the rules don’t have to be exactly the same), but the difference in scale and, as you note, variability in the rules for different parts of those sites makes it so much harder to apply.

It's worth noting that IMO, the scale is not just volume (depth) but also cultural heterogeneity (breadth). HN is for all intents and purposes a single community with a stated set of values. It's not a constellation of communities some of which are polar opposites of one another. The question of moderating Reddit always boils down to /which subreddit/ -- I don't even know where to start with YouTube.

> HN is for all intents and purposes a single community with a stated set of values

In the sense that we all value curiosity, yes.

We are all also very different. When political posts go up you see it; value, perspective, economic, and educational differences are all highlighted simultaneously.

I think what keeps us from destroying each other is that the binds that bond are curiosity, and those bonds are strong enough for now. dang also sacrifices his sanity going around and nudging people back in the right direction.

Those bonds are nothing to be understated though. I've tolerated some edgy opinions on this website, and probably given some too, but I also come here to learn about different perspectives and genuinely do enjoy them even if some offend or hurt me. Other people see those differences and talk about making lists.

> Those bonds are nothing to be understated though... Other people see those differences and talk about making lists.

Yes, exactly! I think you nailed the core of it. The communal drive to pursue curiosity is, for now, stronger than the communal drive to make lists; in comparison, there are many large subreddits where you couldn't expect the same thing.

> It's not a constellation of communities some of which are polar opposites of one another.

It absolutely is, which is the main reason dang is constantly having to talk people down off of ledges. This site has old-school hackers and new school VC startup hackers, anarchists, communists, socialists, capitalists, libertarians, Libertarians, atheists and believers, alt-right white supremacists, BLM supporters, QAnons, scientists, "scientists", skeptics, shitposting memelords, furries, pro Stallmanite free software zealots, anti-Stallmanite free software zealots, Stallman agnostic free software zealots, FAANG millionaires and people living in their cars.

Name a political position, no matter how repellent someone will come along to advocate it, sometimes just for kicks. Name a programming language, you'll find someone who loves it, someone who hates it, someone who's never heard of it, and probably the person who invented it. That diversity is one of the good things about this place, and one of the worst, because it brings out the worst in people.

There's a very small domain in which discussion on Hacker News is merely contrarian and contentious, but stray outside of that tranquil oasis and you're suddenly in the Thunderdome being chased around a gladiatorial arena by an overclocked sea-lion and a troll with a sniper rifle. But the troll is civil, and that makes them better than the trolls on Reddit.

It's honestly a wonder this place hasn't burned down yet. It's made me want to burn it down a few times.

Au contraire, I'd argue HN is a very diverse site but it's the moderation by both users and moderators that makes it seem orderly and uniform. There are many stories that get flagged a-la blogspam, low quality, clickbait etc, and same with comments. Those that don't have merit by the community don't reach the wider audience. I think the conception that HN is uniform is a somewhat common misunderstanding, as evidenced by discussions on supposedly-trolls and the like: it isn't usually the case that someone is shilling or trolling, more often than not it's just someone with a different world view.

I think HN moderation works because it is relatively obscure and several orders of magnitude smaller than FB/Twitter/etc. I wonder long do it would take for HN to be completely overwhelmed if a large subreddit decided to come in and start trolling/spamming?

HN is very heavy on Academics / Developers / Engineers.

Very different demographics then world at large.

There are very few meaning of word diverse that HN conforms to. Education, profession, gender, hobbies, location, all tend to be from one cluster.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

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